He walked into the living room and pulled aside the brown paper taped to the window. Outside, the dark streets were relieved by streetlights, each illuminating a blurred ellipse on the sidewalks and grass. A car drove past— shushand whooshof wet pavement—its headlights intensely blue. For two days now, barely able to move, he had been reading—pulling newspapers and magazines out of recycling bins under the kitchen sink, trying to find out how much time he had—how much time they all had in this world before the signs multiplied, the cryptids started proliferating, the books spilled over with nonsense—and the dust and mildew began taking hold.
Brer Rabbit ran so fast
Skip right out o’ his skin,
Had ter push ’nother rabbit out—
And climb—
Back—
In.
He let the shade drop and pulled up a lone dining room chair in the middle of the floor. The chair legs scraped on the uneven boards like the cry of a hoarse old woman.
What else was different about this world? Besides the desperate minus of Daniel Patrick Iremonk…
You tell me what’s different, Brer Rabbit.
Whar you fum?
Daniel’s home had also been called Seattle.
Classic Seattle. Wetter and grayer than this one, if that was possible—less populated, not nearly as much concentrated wealth. A friendlier city—more face-to-face communication, neighborhoods sticking together—kids didn’t spend endless hours glued to computer screens, locked in artificial worlds—more grounded; a world he remembered as more suitable, more right, yet he had never fit in. Always looking for a way out, an excuse to leave, and finally he had found both, to his infinite and probably short-lived regret.
Right out o’ yo’ skin.
Finally, in his teens, he had put that name to what he was doing: jaunting. Crossing the strands of varied fates—traveling in the fifth dimension for advantage. Playing Monopoly without moving around all the squares: squiggling around the game board, or digging down throughstacked boards. The rich got richer because they were rich, but the poor got poorer because they had to stick to the rules, they could not burrow through the game like a Monopoly mole, or jump sideways—like a rabbit. Now, dat rabbit, some rabbit,
Brer Rabbit, my, how he could jump!
Also in his teens, he had decided it was time to study up on what he was actually doing, and that eventually led him across the freeway to an old Carnegie library on the corner of Fiftieth and Roosevelt—still there. In the soft glow of great hanging saucer lamps of bronze and milky glass, listening to rain patter against the high windows, Daniel had studied popular science books by Gamow, Weinberg, and Hawking, and finally came across P.C.W. Davies, who had taught him about special relativity, singularities, and universal constants.
A man named Hugh Everett had created the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and two Davids—Bohm and Deutsch, very different in their thinking—had taught him about the possibility of multiverses. Daniel had then conceived of branching realities, four-dimensional cosmoses arranged side by side, in a way, across a fifth dimension…a thick rope of world-strands. John Cramer, a professor at the University of Washington, had speculated about retrocausality—particles reaching back to reconcile their present with the past—which Daniel could feel happening inside his gray box—though he had no idea what it meant.
As he got older and acquired a little savvy (you couldn’t jump backward and stay young, and you certainly couldn’t jump forward—just “sideways,” “up,” or “down”), he imagined himself a kind of athlete. How oftencould he jump—and how far, with how much sense of direction or accuracy?
How could he improve his situation the most?
Where would he finally land, measured on the Money-Love spectrum?
That got him into a frustrating tangle. Trying to end up with more money, he soon learned that improved circumstance required more personal effort, not less—and his base personality was not good at keepinglots of money.
And so he tried improving his life at the expense of another’s—predatory jumping. (And wasn’t that where his talent had been all along? He had seen it so often—Daniel doing better, Joe Blow not so good, whereas Joe Blow had been doing okay before the jump—but he could never proveit, not with any rigor—and maybe he didn’t want to know for sure.)
Daniel was never deliberately cruel. He didn’t enjoy hurting people. He was just a man with a nervous tic for fortune—but no knack for ultimate design, no fashion sense for fate. Maybe I’m a lot more screwed up than poor, sick, scrawny Charles Granger. After all, I pushed him out. Right out o’ his skin.
He would need to make another move soon—and how could he do that? He didn’t even know how he’d ended up in Granger, except that they shared versions of the same house, proximal to the same stones.
Standing on the corner, staring at drivers—even in his worst times, those last days when the shadows began closing in—he had never been so isolated. He had to start reaching out, checking the pulse and mood of real people with real emotions.
The night was lonely—scary lonely. Being alone seemed less attractive than it had ever been before—because now Daniel was certain of two things.
This world was nearing its end. And this body was dying.
CHAPTER 14
Capitol Hill
Ellen Crowe had company when Jack returned. The clink of wineglasses and female voices in the dining room revealed that Ellen’s book group was in session. They called themselves the Witches of Eastlake. He looked at the invitation on the card. He had forgotten it was tonight. Jack opened the garage door as quietly as possible and was up on the stepladder bringing down the cage when Ellen called from the rear porch. “Hey, stranger. Don’t be shy. Are you hungry?”
Jack walked back. His rats sniffed the air, fragrant with cooking. “I don’t think your friends would like me barging in,” he said.
“It’s my house,” Ellen said.
He gave her a weak smile. He washungry—he had not eaten since breakfast, and Ellen was a fine cook.
Jack sat on a stool in the kitchen as Ellen pulled a tray of game hens from the ornate black and chrome gas oven. The roasted birds smelled delicious. The rats clustered at the front of their cage, noses twitching.
She forked one of the birds onto a plate on the counter. Mushroom stuffing, Jack noted. “We’ve already eaten. Help yourself to salad. There’s wine in the fridge.”
“Am I going to sing for my supper?” he asked.
“Anything but that,” Ellen said.
Shoving a napkin into the collar of his black T-shirt and floofing it out like an ascot, he struck a pose with upraised knife and fork. Baggy pants held up by red suspenders, hair wild and black and face thin,
high cheekbones and large liquid eyes, Jack flaunted his formidable lack of dignity. “What are you reading this month?”
“An Oprah book. You wouldn’t like it.”
He sniffed.
Ellen sniffed back. “Enjoy. There’s canned dog food for the rats in the fridge. I’ll introduce you during dessert.”
Jack pruned up his face. He did not know what she was up to. Some sort of test—or bizarre revenge?